WELCOME back to football. Finally.

Friday night's West Coast-Indigenous All Stars game was a pipe-opener, but this Thursday night's Hawthorn-Collingwood NAB Challenge clash at Aurora Stadium marks the first time on the calendar when the balls are kicked in, well, semi-anger.

It is a very late start to organised football as the AFL plays the good corporate citizen and delays the start of the home and away season to accommodate cricket's World Cup.

Not that the AFL had a whole lot of choice. With no access to the MCG and other shared venues until the first weekend of April and given the unpopularity of last year's staggered kick-off to the season, the League is preparing for its latest start since 1988, when the opening match took place on April 2.

The pre-season competition is also off to its latest start since 2006 when the first game was on February 24. That was another year in which the AFL agreed to schedule its season around another sporting event – the Melbourne Commonwealth Games.

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The AFL is an easy target in the eyes of many who mistakenly believe the League has embarked on some sort of quest to dominate the headlines for 12 months a year, and while other sports don't have the same issues in terms of venue availability, it is worth noting that the Super Rugby season is well underway and that the NRL also has no qualms with going head-to-head with the cricket. Its season starts on March 5.

Longer pre-season a burden for some, a blessing for others

What the delayed start to the season has done is pose a new set of challenges for AFL coaching staffs.

Players reported back to training through November and December at their usual dates but with pre-season games commencing later – by three weeks in some instances – than last year, keeping the players fresh and motivated through February has required some lateral thinking.

"They're ready to play right now," Greater Western Sydney coach Leon Cameron told AFL.com.au, echoing the thoughts of several coaches. His club doesn't play its NAB Challenge opener for another fortnight. 

Some clubs introduced training camps in late January, early February as a way of breaking up the pre-season. Carlton went to the high country, Collingwood to New Zealand and the Western Bulldogs to the Sunshine Coast. The AFL community camps have also provided some respite to the day-in, day-out grind that is the pre-season. 

Others have just used to the extended summer to get more conditioning into their players. Melbourne's Paul Roos said the difference between his players entering this NAB Challenge compared with last year was "chalk and cheese", while St Kilda's Alan Richardson estimated that training loads and intensity were "15 per cent" up on last year. 

At Fremantle Ross Lyon estimates his players have undergone the equivalent of five weeks of extra training through the combination of the longer pre-season and a new training schedule that gives the players Thursdays off and incorporates a running session on Saturday.

For North Melbourne the extended pre-season has been a blessing. The Kangaroos were the walking wounded after playing deep into last September and with a summer injury list that includes – or has included – Drew Petrie, Ben Brown, Majak Daw, Aaron Black, Nathan Grima, Lachlan Hansen, Lindsay Thomas, Scott Thompson and Aaron Mullett, the Kangaroos will enter the season at less than full strength and slightly underdone. 

"It's been really fortuitous for us that the World Cup cricket was on," said coach Brad Scott. "We'd be scrambling now to get guys up for the start of the regular season."

Drew Petrie is one of several Kangaroos racing for full fitness ahead of round one. Picture: AFL Media

Rare sighting of Tassie Pies as Dogs head back to the kennel

SO it all begins on Thursday night with the Hawks-Magpies in Launceston and officials are expecting a near-capacity crowd at Aurora Stadium.

The match serves both clubs well. For the Hawks it kick-starts their annual community camp in Tasmania, where for the following three days they will cover the length and breadth of the state. 

The Pies will be keen to do well. They haven’t laid a glove on the Hawks since the 2011 preliminary final and a good showing here will spark some optimism about the season ahead.

They haven’t played in Tasmania since Jock McHale was coach and they have been out and about trying to drum up support. The mix of crowd allegiance on Thursday night will be interesting.

Still, of the six NAB Challenge games this weekend, one is a stand-out. It is Western Bulldogs-Richmond at the Whitten Oval in a twilight game on Saturday. 

Yep. The Whitten Oval. It was last year that Punt Road came back from the grave as a pre-season football venue and now it is the turn of the long-time home of the Bulldogs, last used as a home and away venue in round 21, 1997. 

Like all the old suburban VFL/AFL venues, it has been significantly downsized both in capacity and length. At one stage its playing surface was only four metres shorter than the vast Waverley Park.

The ground proved a huge hit for Bulldogs fans last year as the home venue for the reconstituted Footscray VFL team, which won the premiership. And the early signs are that next Saturday they will come from all over for the game against the Tigers, partly to reminisce and to have a first look at how the Dogs shape up under new coach Luke Beveridge. Capacity is now about 12,000 and the Dogs will go close to packing it out. 

This column spent a memorable couple of hours traipsing around the Whitten Oval recently with Tony Leonard, formerly of the Coodabeen Champions, currently of Fairfax Radio and Crocmedia and always a devoted son of the west. The video is on AFL.com.au now and Bulldog diehards will love it.

Richmond brought footy back to Punt Road in the 2014 NAB Challenge. Picture: AFL Media

He grew up in nearby Gordon Street and went to school at St Johns West Footscray, which is situated across the road from Charlie Sutton's long-time pub, the Albert Hotel. It was there where his football day, and that of many other Bulldogs fans, would start and end.

Leonard is a walking and talking encyclopedia of the Whitten Oval and he can pinpoint almost to the centimetre, despite the changed dimensions, where many of the great moments took place.

He was there as a teenager in 1969 when the legendary Ted Whitten kicked the sealer from the dead pocket at the Footscray Road end as the battling Bulldogs upset the red-hot Richmond and can still recite the play-by-play.

He can stand in the very spot where Kelvin Templeton was paid a dubious mark (easily found on YouTube if you have the inclination) to kick his 15^th goal against St Kilda in 1978 and where in 1984 Collingwood's Graeme Allan kicked across goal straight into the arms of a gleeful Simon Beasley, whose goal on the siren gave the Bulldogs a five-point win.

And he paid homage to the Doug Hawkins wing and the long demolished coaches' box that used to be perched high above the outer, first used by a young Mick Malthouse and which could be accessed only through a rickety spiral staircase.

For Leonard and thousands of others, Saturday will be an affirmation of how they came to love Footscray and more lately, the Western Bulldogs.

"You would live in eternal hope," he said of following a team that for the most part wasn't much good. "You would see the great players have their great games against the Dogs. But there would be a win along the way that would sustain you for the next week, the next month, the next year."

Hats off to the AFL for staging this game on Saturday. And next year, it should be the turn of Victoria Park.

Facebook Question Time

With the NAB Challenge looming, is it fair to say that the pre-season event is less relevant this season due to the Essendon issues? With over half their squad unavailable, it seems difficult to get a read on not just Essendon but also the other clubs playing against them this pre-season. – Thomas Bennett
The NAB Challenge is all about minutes, structures and getting used to the body contact that only an opponent can inflict. As far as St Kilda, Greater Western Sydney and Melbourne are concerned, who lines up for Essendon is almost immaterial. There will be outcomes out of the game that they are seeking and it wouldn't matter if Matthew Lloyd or John Coleman were lining up at full-forward for the Bombers. 

Should James Hird keep pursuing his proclamation of no wrong-doing at the EFC to the High Court? At what point will he let it go. – David Fisher
The end is in sight now, David. We should have a resolution within a month – just before the AFL season launch festivities towards the end of next month is my prediction. Given how handily Hird was defeated in the two court cases, you would think he would now take his lumps and await the outcome of the anti-doping tribunal. Where it will get interesting for Hird is if the tribunal hands down sweeping suspensions and whether his position with the Bombers then becomes untenable.

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